Armenia And Azerbaijan

 

ARMENIA & AZERBAIJAN

Simmer, and Boil

Recently, Azerbaijan released a video of Azeri soldiers firing rockets at enemy emplacements in Nagorno-Karabakh, a region in the South Caucasus, Reuters reported. They also released photographs of the alleged damage of Armenian shelling in the Azeri town of Terter.

War has returned to the enclave.

Nagorno-Karabakh’s population is mostly ethnically Armenian but the enclave is within Azerbaijan, explained Al Jazeera. Both countries are former Soviet republics whose borders reflect the whims of communist mapmakers, not the facts on the ground. Rather than delineate the Armenian populations, they divided them from one another.

“In essence, this is a story of a powerful outsider changing history by drawing arbitrary lines on a map that would later spark conflict,” wrote international relations analyst and author, Ian Bremmer in Time.

The region’s status has been disputed since 1918 when the Russian empire fell. During the Soviet era, leaders in Moscow imposed peace from above. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in the 1990s, the citizens of Nagorno-Karabakh moved to break away from Azerbaijan and join Armenia, triggering a war between Armenian and Azeri forces that resulted in 30,000 deaths.

Since then, skirmishes have been common for years along the border. This time, though, it’s on a bigger scale, with both sides using armed drones and powerful, long-range rocket artillery, analysts say. Already, civilians have been killed on all sides, CBS News reported Tuesday.

In recent fighting, it appears that Azerbaijan had been planning a long-awaited assault to recover a part of Nagorno-Karabakh, the Economist wrote. Azerbaijan’s ambassador to the UK, Tahir Taghizade, writing in the Guardian, argued that Armenia has attempted to ethnically cleanse the region. Azeri leaders describe Armenian troops in Nagorno-Karabakh as violating Azeri sovereignty, added Newsweek.

Most of the fighting so far has been artillery duels. After fears of a full-fledged war between the two sides, the second concern among international observers is how the conflict might spiral out of control, dragging Turkey, Russia, Europe and others into a potential mire.

French President Emmanuel Macron, Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump have called for an end to the fighting, Bloomberg wrote. Turkey supports Azerbaijan, however, and has backed the offensive to retake a part of Nagorno-Karabakh. Russia, meanwhile, has signed a mutual-defense pact with Armenia and has an army base in the country.

The fight could expand like others have done in the region. The Jerusalem Post reported that Turkey has recruited and transported Syrian soldiers to fight on behalf of Azerbaijan, a majority Shiite Muslim country whose citizens are ethnically related to Turkish folks.

Armenia is almost entirely Christian. Armenians also maintain that they suffered genocide under the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th Century, which Turkey’s official version of history denies.

It’s a combustible mix, leaving civilians like Ruzanna Avagyana, a 53-year-old social worker from the ethnic Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, caught in the middle.

“People are afraid,” she told the New York Times.